With a sharp contraction of the heart he shut his eyes again.  When he opened them they rested on the alder-twig, a couple of yards above, holding out mocking finger-tips, and he turned his head in the snow till again he could see the mock-suns looking down.

“As well try to reach the sky as reach the alder-bush.  What did that mean?  That he was really going to lie there till he died? He die, and the Colonel and everybody else go on living?”

He half rose on his elbow at the monstrous absurdity of the idea.  “I won’t die!” he said out loud.

Crack, crack! warned the ice-crust between him and that long fall to the river.  With horror at his heart he shrank away and hugged the face of the precipice.  Presently he put out his hand and broke the ice-crust above.  With mittened fists and palms he pounded firm a little ledge of snow.  Reaching out further, he broke the crust obliquely just above, and having packed the snow as well as he could immediately about, and moving lengthwise with an infinite caution, he crawled up the few inches to the narrow ledge, balancing his stiff body with a nicety possible only to acrobat or sleep-walker.

It was in no normal state of ordinary waking senses that the work went on—­with never a downward look, nor even up, eyes riveted to the patch of snow on which the mittened hands fell as steady and untrembling as steel hammers.  In the seconds of actual consciousness of his situation that twice visited him, he crouched on the ledge with closed eyes, in the clutch of an overmastering horror, absolutely still, like a bird in the talons of a hawk.  Each time when he opened his eyes he would stare at the snow-ledge till hypnotised into disregard of danger, balance his slight body, lift one hand, and go on pounding firm another shallow step.  When he reached the alder-bush his heart gave a great leap of triumph.  Then, for the first time since starting, he looked up.  His heart fell down.  It seemed farther than ever, and the light waning.

But the twilight would be long, he told himself, and in that other, beneficent inner twilight he worked on, packing the snow, and crawling gingerly up the perilous stair a half-inch at a time.

At last he was on the jutting rock, and could stand secure.  But here he could see that the top of the bluff really did shelve over.  To think so is so common an illusion to the climber that the Boy had heartened himself by saying, when he got there he would find it like the rest, horribly steep, but not impossible.  Well, it was impossible.  After all his labour, he was no better off on the rock than in the snow-hole below the alder, down there where he dared not look.  The sun and his dogs had travelled down, down.  They touched the horizon while he sat there; they slipped below the world’s wide rim.  He said in his heart, “I’m freezing to death.”  Unexpectedly to himself his despair found voice: 

“Colonel!”